


Grief Is A Swamp

by thewordsthatweareneeding



Category: Young Justice - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-30
Updated: 2017-01-30
Packaged: 2018-09-20 22:05:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9518078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thewordsthatweareneeding/pseuds/thewordsthatweareneeding
Summary: “I was just…I guess I’m really just calling you to see if you’re okay,” M’gann admits. Her voice sounds teary. “Are you okay, Artemis?”Artemis considers the question for a moment and feels nothing. There is no pain, no grief, just a heaviness that sits in her bones and a buzzing always in the back of her mind. She thinks that means maybe the worst of it is over.“I’m okay,” Artemis says.//grief is not a linear process and Artemis Crock has never half-assed anything in her life





	

The day Wally dies, Artemis doesn’t stop crying. She vacillates between hearty, guttural sobs and silent tears with brief periods of respite. It’s like a bad case of the hiccups, the way she can never seem to stop once she’s started, the way she always seems to be one too-sudden breath away from starting again. By the time she disentangles herself from the Wests and heads home, she is empty of tears, of grief, of everything. Her eyes are swollen and her throat hurts and she has never been this tired before. Even then, she lies awake for hours after crawling into bed, unable to cry, unable to sleep, shaking alone in the dark. She’s never hated herself more.

 

In the light of the next day, she sees herself in the mirror and frowns. She is pale enough that the bags under her eyes look like bruises and she can’t even look herself in the face without shifting her weight in discomfort. There is no trace there of a hero, nor of her father’s daughter. She wonders if this is how she looked as a child when her mother didn’t come home that night, when Jade sat her down and explained things to her like prison, like paralysis, and her father looked on with a sour grimace. Her stomach turns.

 

That thought is all it takes to get Artemis started on packing a bag. She picks up her phone, thinking to call in a warning, but sees a laundry list of unanswered texts and missed calls instead. She turns her phone off. In another hour, she is on Jade’s doorstep with nothing but a duffel bag and a glazed expression. Her sister looks at her, hard and scrutinizing, before opening the door wider and stepping aside. Jade doesn’t say anything except to ask how long she is staying and to ask her to change Lian’s diaper.

 

Artemis moves through the house like a ghost, not speaking unless spoken to, not moving if she doesn’t have to. It takes a few days for her to even believe she exists when no one is looking at her. But she doesn’t cry again, which is why she went to Jade in the first place. Years of healing and a miraculous side switching or not, Jade has a way of bringing out all of Artemis’s sharp edges just by being there. Jade reminds her of the person she was raised to be, of years of training, of a different lifetime when there was no room for weakness. Artemis never expected to cherish that, but it’s easier now. At least, crying in front of Jade or Roy is unfathomable, and neither of them are the type of people to talk things out, and Artemis can go through the motions of being a person without ever having to look her grief in the eye.

 

In a few weeks, she finds a routine. She gets out of bed every morning. She showers. She runs. She goes grocery shopping when Jade asks, she cooks dinner once or twice a week, and she starts laughing again. The sound of it is harsher than before and hoarse, more of a bark than a true laugh, but it’s a start. It’s enough that she picks up the next time Zatanna calls and, though neither of them really has anything to say, Artemis thinks she does a fairly convincing impression of a stable, grounded human being. She promises to stop by the Cave soon to see everyone, but doesn’t set a date. Zatanna seems satisfied regardless.

 

Later that day, Artemis sends Mary West a text. She doesn’t bother addressing any of the fourteen unanswered messages directly, just says, “I’m sorry. I’m adjusting,” and leaves it there. Mary calls her later and she answers. They don’t have much to talk about either, but they don’t need to. Mary starts crying nearly as soon as Artemis says hello. The sounds of Wally’s mom drawing jagged breaths and sobbing pull at something in her chest, but her heart is a knot that she has spent too long retying for it to come undone that easily. Artemis just blinks and murmurs soothing words into the phone. She keeps coming back to “I’m sorry.” When Mary sniffles and says they miss her around there, Artemis hardens herself against the guilt.

 

“I’ll come by soon,” she says. “I’ll drop off some of his stuff.”

 

It’s the right thing to say, she’s certain, but it sets Mary off crying even harder. Artemis just listens and apologizes over and over again.

 

A week later Artemis moves out of Jade’s apartment and returns to Palo Alto. Aside from a thin layer of dust, her apartment looks just as she left it and for a moment, it’s like her entire life has been paused, like she can just slip back into the scene and take a breath and Wally will come through the door any second. Artemis clenches her jaw and drops her bag on the floor. She calls M’gann and before she can even really let herself feel comfortable in that empty apartment, M’gann is walking through the door, followed by Zatanna, Conner, and Kaldur. Between the five of them, it only takes a couple of hours to pack up all of Wally’s things. Dick is still MIA and, distantly, Artemis is grateful for that. The last time she’d seen him, he’d been carrying his sorrow like a pallbearer, solemn and enduring. He wouldn’t understand the silent, cowardly thing she has become.

 

Artemis drops Wally’s things off at the West’s house and stays for dinner. Mary West makes a casserole that Artemis eats but does not taste. They make polite conversation about the weather, about the news, about anything other than the empty fourth chair at the table. Wally’s father, Rudolph, goes to the kitchen to put the food away and there is so much leftover that he stops and stares down at his hands. Artemis doesn’t miss the rapid way he blinks or the way his shoulders fall. She stands wordlessly and helps him scoop the food out into Tupperware. Mary insists she take some home, so she doesn’t have to worry about cooking for a while. Artemis doesn’t argue.

 

The casserole sits in her fridge untouched for another week. She is back in the Palo Alto apartment, not sure where else to go. She sleeps on the couch most nights and lives off of cereal and canned soup. After another week, she throws the casserole out and goes grocery shopping. M’gann calls her and they talk for twenty minutes about what color the team should paint the living room of the newly rebuilt Cave of Justice. Artemis hardly listens, which is fine, because M’gann doesn’t seem to really care either. When Artemis goes to hang up, M’gann stops her with a shaky breath.

 

“I was just…I guess I’m really just calling you to see if you’re okay,” M’gann admits. Her voice sounds teary. “Are you okay, Artemis?”

 

Artemis considers the question for a moment and feels nothing. There is no pain, no grief, just a heaviness that sits in her bones and a buzzing always in the back of her mind. She thinks that means maybe the worst of it is over.

 

“I’m okay,” Artemis says.

 

The words sound hollow, but M’gann seems satisfied. They make plans to get lunch later that week and hang up.

 

Suddenly, Wally has been dead for three months. Artemis’s clothes hang loose on her frame now and she can’t seem to sleep through the night, not really, but overall, she’s fine. She doesn’t think of him very often, or at least, she can always push the thought of him away, and the pain never comes back. Not like that first day. She goes on missions with the team again and helps train the younger members and she remembers to call her mom at least once a week. Kaldur tells her once, in passing, that she looks like herself again. She gives him a thin smile in response, but it is still a smile, and she blooms slightly with pride that she has come that far.

 

After four months, Artemis stops waiting for the pain to come back and starts believing that this is it, the end of the long and dark tunnel, that she has started to come out the other side. She doesn’t feel stronger for it. Just hollow. Just muted. There’s a remnant of her fifteen year old self in the back of her mind that rages at her for being so quick to recover, that hates how she could lose someone like Wally and be over it in four short months. The overwhelming part of her isn’t even surprised, though, and that’s much worse. She had always known her nature to be cold and unrepentant; Wally had made her feel soft and warm, and Wally was gone now. Only Artemis and her clinical misery remained.

 

And then it is a Tuesday and she is supposed to meet Zatanna for lunch, but Zatanna is running late. Artemis stands in her kitchen aimlessly, not enough time left before Zatanna’s arrival for Artemis to really do anything but wait, but enough time for her mind to wander. Her heart balks at the opportunity and she goes to the sink to start washing the dishes from her breakfast that morning. She lets the water run, focuses on the warmth of it spilling over her fingers, and takes a deep breath. Artemis keeps washing the same dish long after she knows it is clean, for lack of anything else to do with her hands.

 

She goes to slide the plate back onto the counter, but her fingers are slow and clumsy with distraction. She watches it spill from her hand to the floor. She doesn’t even try to catch it. The glass shatters against the tile, loud as a gunshot in her empty apartment. Artemis blinks. It takes a minute for her mind to catch up with the reality, for the splintered sherds to make any kind of sense to her mind. The image is foreign to her in a way that it shouldn’t be and her thoughts trip over themselves trying to figure out why. She’s never seen a plate break in that apartment. Her breath sticks in her throat.

 

She and Wally had always done the dishes together, her washing, him drying. It was part of the soothing and domestic pattern they’d built when they moved in together. Routine had been a new taste in her mouth then and they’d both been surprised to find that she enjoyed it, that doing the same thing and the same time every single day could be comforting and dear to her. He would tell her about his day and she would smile and listen and nudge his ribcage with her elbow when he told a particularly bad joke. He always stood so close she could feel the heat of him like a phantom limb. She’d forgotten that, until now.

 

And then she realizes that she hadn’t even tried to catch the plate before it fell. She’d somehow managed to dull that reflex after years of disuse. What had been the point, after all, of trying to catch it when she knew that Wally would be there faster, his hands darting out and recovering the dish so smoothly as to not even throw off their rhythm. She’d gotten used to it. A few years of living with Wally versus a decade and a half of living without and Artemis had come to rely on him so completely as to unlearn something as innate as trying to catch a falling thing.

 

And then she realizes she’s trembling. She can’t look away from the broken plate. The image sticks with her in a way that not even Wally’s coffin had, because that had been created after the fact, that had been new and then it had been gone and she’d never had to think of it again. This was different. The plate had been part of a set they bought together when they first moved in. Wally had held it, had eaten off of it, had washed and dried it. And now it was on the floor. And now it was broken. It was broken and it wouldn’t have been broken if Wally was there, and Wally was gone and the plate would never be unbroken again. It’s not the first physical evidence Artemis has that the world is different without Wally in it, but it’s the first time she’s surprised by it in four months. It’s the first time she realizes that, until she had heard the glass shatter, she had been waiting for Wally’s hands to appear out of nowhere and set it right.

 

And then the knot of her heart comes undone. Her eyes become undammed and tears are leaking out of them and she falls to her knees and she is howling. Her voice is distant and primal, even to her. Her grief is a living thing. It writhes in her chest, kicking her heart into her throat and her lungs into her stomach and all the air out of her. She is raw with it, stinging everywhere sorrow spills from her into the open air. She does not cry so much as weep, fingers tangled in her hair, palms pressed into her forehead. She does not stop.

 

Zatanna finds her like that, crumpled on herself in the floor, still wailing almost ten minutes later. She is so hoarse now that she wheezes and gasps where once she had been screaming. She is shaking so hard she thinks she might vibrate through the floor, the thought of which only makes her shake harder. Zatanna drops to her knees beside her and tugs Artemis into her embrace. Artemis barely registers her presence. She’s too busy trying to catch her breath. She’s too busy trying to remember the name of the last movie she and Wally watched together. She’s too busy catching up on four months worth of grief, and damned if she is not paying it back with interest. Zatanna strokes her hair and rocks her until Artemis stills.

 

“Are you done?” Zatanna asks, the lightness of her tone doing nothing to disguise the tension and fear in her voice.

 

Artemis looks at her with wide and sorrowful eyes. She has only just begun. She doesn’t know how to stop.

 

“Okay,” Zatanna says. Her voice shakes. “Okay. Let’s get you to bed, then.”

 

Artemis lets Zatanna pull her to her feet. She is still looking at the shattered plate, but Zatanna doesn’t notice. She just tugs Artemis lightly by the elbow toward the bedroom. Artemis considers telling her that she hasn’t slept there in weeks, but knows opening her mouth would only mean letting out another sob and she is tired. She is so tired.

 

Artemis has never in her entire life felt so small as when she clambers, blind in her urgency, onto the queen sized bed and feels Zatanna tuck the covers in around her. She curls around herself once again, arms snaking around her sides, and it is an effort just to keep her breath steady. The sheets don’t smell like Wally at all and it makes her itchy everywhere the cotton touches her skin. Zatanna smooths her hair away from her eyes.

 

“What now?” Artemis croaks some time later, when she feels confident that she can talk without dissolving once again into tears. “What am I going to do now?”

 

Zatanna looks at her with measured pity and naked understanding. “Now you stay in bed for a few days. You cry when you feel like you need to and you remember him when you can, when it doesn’t hurt too much, until it doesn’t hurt very much at all. Until thinking of him makes you feel happy and full instead of…like this. And when you feel like this, you call someone. You call me, or M’gann, or Kaldur, or Conner. Or Dick. And you let us take care of you for a little while.”

 

Artemis takes a shaky breath and buries her face in her pillow. The tears come again, but this time she doesn’t fight them.

 

“What am I going to do?” she repeats, her voice a hoarse whisper, her voice an open wound.

 

“You’re going to be okay,” Zatanna says.

 

It’s a start, at least.

**Author's Note:**

> inspired by the poem "Swamp" by Clementine Von Radics, which can be read here http://clementinepoetry.us/post/63596072095/all-of-this-is-to-say-im-having-the-kind-of-day
> 
> 10/10 would recommend reading if you're coping with the wait for YJ season three by upsetting yourself constantly thinking about whether or not Wally will stay dead like i am. if that is your thing, by the way, 100% hit me up for more #relevant poems and quotes because i have a lot of feelings and i am knee deep in this right now


End file.
